FAB: The French Absolute Beginner Corpus for Pronunciation Training

We introduce the French Absolute Beginner (FAB) speech corpus. The corpus is intended for the development and study of Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) tools for absolute beginner learners. Data were recorded during two experiments focusing on using a CAPT system in paired role-play tasks. The setting grants FAB three distinguishing features from other non-native corpora: the experimental setting is ecologically valid, closing the gap between training and deployment; it features a label set based on teacher feedback, allowing for context-sensitive CAPT; and data have been primarily collected from absolute beginners, a group often ignored. Participants did not read prompts, but instead recalled and modified dialogues that were modelled in videos. Unable to distinguish modelled words solely from viewing videos, speakers often uttered unintelligible or out-of-L2 words. The corpus is split into three partitions: one from an experiment with minimal feedback; another with explicit, word-level feedback; and a third with supplementary read-and-record data. A subset of words in the first partition has been labelled as more or less native, with inter-annotator agreement reported. In the explicit feedback partition, labels are derived from the experiment{'}s online feedback. The FAB corpus is scheduled to be made freely available by the end of 2020.